Bad Medicine- A Life for a Life; Bed of Nails; Going Viral

by Puckett, Andrew

  We were buzzed through the hallowed stone doorway and a flunky ushered us through hushed corridors to a small, windowless boardroom. There were already six other people present.

  ‘Ah, Fenella,’ One of them, the very model of a desiccated civil servant came over to us. His eyes narrowed as he saw me and she said firmly, ‘Since Dr Smith is Head of the Western Area, Colin, I’ve decided it would be best if he were my official executive.’

  ‘But I thought I’d made it clear…’ he began, then his lips compressed in irritation… ‘We’ll discuss it later,’ he said ominously, ignoring me.

  He turned to the others. ‘Since we’re all here we’d better make a start.’

  He took a seat at the highly polished round table and indicated for the rest of us to do the same. I sat next to Fenella.

  What was her game? Had she directly disobeyed him in bringing me here, was it some sort of fait accompli…?

  He reminded us that we’d all signed the Official Secrets Act and how it thus went without saying that nothing was to be divulged to any other party without his express permission. Dignified pause, then: ‘For those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Colin Blake and I’m a senior civil servant here.’

  I later discovered that he was Sir Colin and very senior indeed, and I suppose it said something for him that he didn’t make anything of this.

  ‘A COBRA meeting was convened three days ago, and as a result, I’ve been asked by the Prime Minister to act as facilitator at this level.’

  COBRA. Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. So this was it, or something very like it. I quickly glanced round. Some people, like Fenella already knew, but others, like me, didn’t.

  He went on, ‘I suggest we all, very briefly, introduce ourselves.’ He turned to the tall, soldierly man on his right in police uniform.

  ‘I’m Commander Brigg and I head the HCTU. That’s the Home Counter Terrorism Unit.’ He had a narrow, rather hard face, a moustache and short dark hair going grey at the temples. He glanced at the woman to his right in civvies.

  ‘Rebecca Hale,’ she said. ‘Detective Inspector, HCTU.’

  She had long dark hair and a (probably deceptively) gentle face.

  The man next to them in army uniform told us he was Major John Gibb, an urban control specialist. Then came Fenella and me, and lastly, a man and a woman who were a molecular virologist and analytical chemist respectively, both from Porton Down. Which brought us back to Blake.

  ‘The reason you’re all here,’ he said, ‘is that four days ago, the Prime Minister’s office received a parcel through the post, together with this letter.’ He dimmed the lights and a large monitor on the wall glowed. It read:

  Dear Prime Minister,

  Accompanying this letter is a sealed, airtight package. Under no circumstances should it be opened other than in a Containment Level Four laboratory for dangerous pathogens. It contains a chick embryo infected with live Variola Major, the smallpox virus.

  As you read this, Prime Minister, thousands of children are starving to death in Africa.

  That obviously went over your head, so I will repeat it.

  THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN ARE STARVING TO DEATH IN AFRICA.

  And we, the British, bear a large measure of responsibility for that.

  Throughout the 18th and during the early 19th century, we kidnapped them in their thousands and sold them into slavery.

  We occupied their countries, stole their natural resources, confiscated their land and sold it to our own. We then oppressed them and treated them as second-class human beings.

  Then, we walked away, leaving them to cope with the mess we’d bequeathed to them. So it’s small wonder they’re starving.

  And what do we do? We deny them the aid they desperately need, allow their children to starve to death because we don’t happen to like their rulers. A country that wastes billions of pounds worth of food per annum, where the fastest growing medical problem is obesity, refuses to give food to the starving - because it doesn’t happen to like their rulers.

  If this were another country, we would say they were no better than murderers.

  But it isn’t another country. It’s us.

  We must repay the debt we owe the African people. We must give them more in aid immediately. The UK’s annual aid budget is approximately £7 billion, of which approximately £2 billion is sent to Africa.

  We demand that by midnight on February 28th at the latest, the government announces an increase in the amount of aid sent to Africa to £4 billion.

  Pour encouragement

  Somalia, in Africa, was the last place in the world to be cleared of endemic smallpox (a further example of how low a priority we regard Africa). If the above announcement is not made by the stipulated time, we will infect a named individual with smallpox. If our demand is not then immediately complied with, the UK will become the first country in the world to suffer a smallpox epidemic since its ‘eradication’ forty years ago.

  John Amend-all

  Chapter 2

  I read it through again, then darted a glance round… Brigg was staring at the middle of the table, while Fenella poured herself a glass of water – they’d obviously already seen it. The others were still reading, the army major’s lips moving slightly as he did...

  A hoax, I thought, has to be… then Blake said, ‘If you’ve all finished reading now, I’ll hand over to Dr Staples.’

  He was the virologist from Porton Down. He was thin, bald and earnest, as a good virologist should be. He described how they’d taken the package back to Porton and opened it as stipulated…

  ‘It was well-sealed and air-tight, as they’d said. Inside was a hen’s egg, infected with a virus which electron microscopy and DNA analysis showed to be Variola Major...’

  As he droned on, I was having one of those weirdly self-aware moments when something you know can’t be happening actually is…

  No hoax then. And Fenella, knowing this, had persuaded me to be her executive against Blake’s will, and then shoved me into his face…

  Why…?

  ‘Do you know which strain?’ she was asking Staples.

  ‘Well, this is where it gets interesting…’

  Interesting! Like the Chinese curse, I thought…

  ‘It seems to be a strain called Som 3, which was isolated from a Somali some fifty years ago.’

  ‘Does it have any particular characteristics?’

  He touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. ‘An increased infectivity. We, my predecessors, that is –’

  ‘So if you’re right, we should be not only interested but terrified.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed meekly. ‘As I was about to say, we thought that this strain had been destroyed in the late seventies, along with all the others.’

  ‘It wasn’t sent to America or Russia, then?’ Brigg asked.

  After the last case of smallpox in the world, which occurred – to our shame – in Birmingham, all the UK stocks, together with the rest of the world’s, had been either destroyed or sent to secure labs in Atlanta, USA, or Novosibirsk in Russia.

  Staples said, ‘The records state clearly that Som 3 was destroyed.’

  ‘So where did this come from?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Concern has been expressed in the past about the security of the Russian lab, but they weren’t sent any of –’

  Blake cut in, ‘For the moment, let’s be practical and just accept that these people have got it, shall we? Which means we have to take this threat seriously.’

  Brigg looked for a moment as though he might argue, but then thought better of it. Blake went on.

  ‘Thanks to Dr Page,’ he nodded to the chemist, ‘we do have an idea of where to start looking. I’ll let her explain.’

  Dr Page seemed to be a slightly shorter, younger, less assertive version of Fenella. Fenella-lite, perhaps…

  ‘I took a sample of the egg shell – sterilised, of course – and ran as complete an analysis as I could in the time availab
le. I then compared this with the specifications supplied by all medium to large animal food manufacturers. To cut a very long story short, the shell contained a form of calcium carbonate used by only one of them: South Western Feeds. It’s a medium sized company based in Devon – a few miles north of Exeter.’

  ‘Presumably they supply throughout the UK?’ Fenella said,

  ‘In theory, yes – but in practice, virtually all their produce is sold in Devon and Somerset. So the chances are that the egg comes from that area.’

  ‘I thought all eggs had to be marked with the farm of origin now.’

  ‘Only if they’re from a supplier with more than a hundred hens.’ She shrugged. ‘I think this one would have to be from a small supplier anyway, for the egg to be fertile.’

  ‘So you’re assuming that John Amend-all are in that area, but couldn’t they have bought the egg there and taken it elsewhere?’

  Brigg came in ‘They could have, yes, but I don’t believe they could’ve foreseen this. I think they’re local.’ He went on, ‘We’re playing a percentage game on this, as we are throughout. We’ve no choice.’ His voice, from so uncompromising a face, was surprisingly soft and persuasive. It had no discernible accent.

  Blake asked if there were any more questions for either of them and was about to excuse them, when I said, ‘I have one for Dr Staples. You told us that this strain of virus is more infectious – can you tell us how much more infectious?’

  ‘No, because infectivity varies so much anyway. The notes just say increased infectivity.’

  ‘Would that have any effect on the vaccines we have now?’

  The present vaccines would be fine, he assured us.

  ‘Talking of vaccines,’ Brigg said, ‘isn’t John Amend-all taking a huge risk? Assuming that vaccines are more or less impossible to get hold of for anyone unauthorised, isn’t he at risk of catching smallpox himself?’

  Staples smiled. ‘All he’d have to do is go to a farm, find a cow with cowpox and infect himself, and he’d have stronger immunity than any vaccine would give him.’

  He then proceeded to treat us to the well-worn story of how Edward Jenner had discovered smallpox vaccine two centuries earlier, when he’d noticed that milkmaids never got smallpox and worked out it was because they’d already had cowpox. I’ve always wondered what Jenner, a respectable married man, was doing staring at milkmaids.

  There were no more questions for the Porton Two, so Blake thanked them and let them go. As the door closed, he turned to Brigg.

  ‘Commander, I know you’ve been making other enquiries, perhaps you’d like to share them with us?’

  Brigg looked round, making sure he had our full attention.

  ‘First, the parcel itself. The packaging materials are of no help, all readily available from anywhere. Also, no fingerprints or anything like that. It was sent first class from a post office just off the Edgware Road. We’ve retrieved the CCTV tape and we think this is the person who sent it.’

  Blake dimmed the lights again and a grainy image appeared on the monitor.

  ‘This is the best of them - which I know doesn’t say much for the rest.’

  It showed a man of about average height turning away from the counter. He was wearing an overcoat, hat and scarf. A beard and moustache covered most of his face and he wore glasses.

  ‘The beard, moustache and glasses are almost certainly false.’

  The army major, Gibb, asked if it was possible to use a computer to enhance the picture and Brigg told him that it was the enhancement he was looking at. ‘All we can really say is that it’s probably a male.’

  ‘So nothing we can glean from it?’ Gibb asked.

  ‘The post office is only half a mile from Paddington Station, which fits with someone coming up from the West of England to post it.’

  Blake switched off the screen and turned up the lights. ‘But that’s not all you’ve done, is it?’

  ‘We’ve had a profiler examine the letter. She suggests a middle-aged white male who’s naive, but also complacent, pleased with himself and patronising. A schoolteacher, perhaps – the way he repeats certain parts, as though to children. Also the use of the French Pour Encouragement. But she thinks the best clue is the obsession with Africa. She suggests someone involved in a charity specifically concerned with Africa and/or slavery…’

  Brigg had certainly done his homework, there were 27 such registered charities in England and Wales, three of them based in the west: Bristol to Africa and The Anti-Slavery League in Bristol, and Open Door in Bath. Bristol to Africa was the largest, with branches in Gloucester, Exeter and Plymouth, while the other two were restricted to Bristol and Bath.

  ‘No registered charity would get involved in anything like this, surely?’ Fenella said.

  ‘No, but whoever John Amend-all are, they could well be people who’ve met through one of them.’

  ‘A bit tenuous, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can you suggest anything better at the moment?’

  No, she couldn’t, she had the grace to admit.

  ‘What about the name they’ve chosen,’ Gibb asked, ‘John Amend-all?’

  It was the pseudonym for the rebel group in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Black Arrow, Brigg told him, and only a clue inasmuch as an older person would have been more likely to have read it. After a pause, he went on, ‘We propose infiltrating people into the head offices of all 27 charities. For the three in the South West, we’re putting someone into every branch as well – that’ll be six altogether.’

  ‘Is there time for that?’ Fenella asked. ‘We’ve got less than -’

  ‘If you’ll allow me to finish… If we take a gung ho approach to these charities, demanding access to their membership files and so on, they’ll almost certainly scream police brutality and obstruct us.’

  He glanced at the woman beside him. ‘My colleague Inspector Hale is the Group Leader in the South West. With your permission, Sir Colin, I’d like her to say a few words about how that’ll work...’

  Blake said, ‘With respect Ms– er – Hale, I think that’s the kind of detail you can discuss later among yourselves. I’d like to move on to how SCRUB intends to cope, should the worst come to the worst, with an outbreak.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Colin,’ Brigg said firmly, ‘but there’s an important point I must raise now. Part of Inspector Hale’s job will be to get the membership lists of all these charities.’ He looked at Fenella. ‘Would you say, Professor, bearing in mind what John Amend-all have already done, that one of them has experience working with viruses?’

  ‘Yes – even just to grow the virus, I’d say they certainly would.’ She looked at me and I nodded my agreement.

  Brigg turned to Blake. ‘This gives us another line of enquiry. If the Professor and Dr Smith can put together a list of all the virologists in the South West, we could see if any of them come up in Inspector Hale’s lists.’

  Blake agreed. ‘My only question is why didn’t we think of this earlier?’ he said, and then promptly added another. ‘Could it be expanded to a national level?’

  ‘With the virologists, I imagine so...’ He looked at Fenella, who nodded . ‘With the charity workers, not so easily. I’ll give it some thought.’

  ‘Do that,’ Blake said.

  Brigg went on – ‘The other thing we need to consider is whether John Amend-all have a laboratory of their own hidden somewhere, or whether they’re doing it surreptitiously in an official lab.’

  He directed this to Fenella, but she batted it straight on to me. I said, ‘Security’s much tighter in NHS labs now, as is the auditing, which makes that less likely. And I don’t think any use hen’s eggs now, although some of the university labs -’

  ‘Do we really need this kind of detail now?’ Blake cut in rudely. ‘As I said earlier, I want to move on to how SCRUB will manage an outbreak. Professor?’

  No more Fenella, I noticed…

  She took a moment to switch channels, then – ‘In a word
, two words, Ring Vaccination.’ She explained how the moment a case was suspected, the putative victim would be isolated and all possible contacts traced, vaccinated and also isolated, if necessary. ‘Then, we repeat the process with their contacts. Only when that’s done do we start thinking about vaccinating the general public.’

  Gibb came in again. ‘Supposing say, a dozen people were infected, would that be enough to start an epidemic? Or would you be able to contain it?’

  ‘In the normal way of things, yes, we’d almost certainly be able to.’

  Brigg leaned forward. ‘Why the qualification, professor? In the normal way of things…’

  ‘Because we have no idea of the infectivity of this virus. Dr Staple informed us, coyly, that it’s increased, but when Dr Smith asked him to enlarge, he declined. We don’t know if it’s the original virus or whether it’s been accentuated in some –’

  ‘Would a straight answer be possible?’ Blake interrupted again.

  She regarded him a moment, then, ‘Very well. I believe we could contain an outbreak of a dozen. Would you agree, Herry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘taken with your qualification.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Blake said softly, ignoring me. ‘Which brings us, lastly, to the eventuality I devoutly hope won’t arise – that of isolating an entire area. Major, if it did become necessary, how would you go about it?’

  ‘Depends on the size and nature of the area,’ he told us. ‘A village, or even a small town can be sealed off easily enough, but an urban area… well, that’s trickier…’ He was a smallish, slightly tubby man with a round, humorous face and a moustache. He told us a bit about the practicalities, then finished by saying he’d put a Chinook and a platoon of men on standby.

  Blake thanked him, then said, ‘I think now may be an appropriate time for us to split up, since there are matters I need to discuss with Professor Mason.’ He rose to his feet. ‘If you’re ready, Professor…?’ He held the door open for her.

  *

  The atmosphere relaxed the moment the door clicked shut. Gibb stretched himself and got up.

  ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could do with some more coffee. Shall I be mother?’